Responsive Design Templates and Frameworks

BluCSS is a CSS framework designed with ease of use and simplicity in mind. It is specifically made so that when you’re working on your next project, you don’t have to worry about the essentials. With BluCSS, you can be up and running in less than a minute.Demo | Download

Adapt.js is a lightweight (826 bytes minified) JavaScript file that determines which CSS file to load before the browser renders a page. If the browser tilts or resizes, Adapt.js simply checks its width, and serves only the CSS that is needed, when it is needed.Download

Mobile Boilerplate is your trusted template made custom for creating rich and performant mobile web apps. You get cross-browser consistency among A-grade smartphones, and fallback support for legacy Blackberry, Symbian, and IE Mobile. You get an offline caching setup for free, fast button clicks, a media query polyfill, and many common mobile WebKit optimizations waiting for you. Use Mobile Boilerplate to start your mobile webapp quickly and immediately benefit from community best practices.

A web grid system designed by Joseph Silvashy and New Gold Leaf that allows designers to use the screen real estate on large monitors and retain great design on smaller ones. The Fluid Grid System combines the principals of the typographic grid and a baseline grid into one resolution-independent framework.Download

Simple Grid is prepared for 4 distinct ranges of screen size: screens 720px, screens 720px, screens than 985px, and screens than 1235px. This means that people visiting your site will receive a layout that’s tuned to the size of their browser window. Say goodbye to horizontal scrollbars.

The Columnal CSS grid system is a “remix” of a couple others with some custom code thrown in. The elastic grid system is borrowed from cssgrid.net, while some code inspiration (and the idea for subcolumns) are taken from 960.gs.Download

Flurid is a cross-browser fluid width grid system optimized for flexibility (fluidity) and one of the only fluid width grid systems to work in Internet Explorer versions 5.0 and newer* without hiding pixels in margins. Like any grid system, the basic purpose is to break the page into a series of rows and columns, giving the designer an easy, rational way to organize and present content to the user.Download

‘320 and Up’ prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a tiny screen’s stylesheet as its starting point. Try this page at different window sizes and on different devices to see it in action.Download

JavaScript libraries & jQuery plugins

The goal of this script is to provide a fast and lightweight (3kb minified / 1kb gzipped) script to enable responsive web designs in browsers that don’t support CSS3 Media Queries – in particular, Internet Explorer 8 and under. It’s written in such a way that it will probably patch support for other non-supporting browsers as well (more information on that soon).

Responsive Web Design Tools and Services

WebPutty gives you a syntax-highlighting CSS editor you can use from anywhere, the power of SCSS and Compass, a side-by-side preview pane, and instant publishing with minification, compression, and automatic cache control.

Media queries are clearly a huge step forward for responsive layouts. Letting you apply different CSS based on the width of the device or the viewport opens up all sorts of possibilities for adapting content to best fit a given space. Media queries work really well when you want to adjust the core layouts of the site, but they’re less suited to changing styles at a smaller more granular level.

Enter the url to your site – local or online: both work – and use the controls to adjust the width and height of your viewport to find exact breakpoint widths in pixels. Then use that information in your media queries to create a responsive design.